It’s
said that you can buy photos of Najibullah on the streets of Kabul
these days and even cassettes of speeches he made in the 1980s when
he was president of Afghanistan. Najibullah’s name evokes controversy.
Always
cited are the condemnation by some Afghans for his ties to the Soviet
Union and his previous role as chief of the country’s internal security
apparatus. However, it is impossible not to acknowledge the country
social gains made during his time in leadership. As soon as his
government was overthrown the victors wiped out land reform programs,
instituted Sharia or Islamic religious law, cut women off from education,
athletics and the professions and banned things like movies, television,
videos, dancing, kite flying, and beard trimming.

Quiet
as it’s kept, for many in the Afghan capital, the Najibullah years
were a time of great promise.

But also of great danger. Outside forces were plotting
and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was spurring reactionary
groups - trained and equipped by the United States, Saudi Arabia,
Pakistan and others - to overthrow the Afghan government. Zbigniew
Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter,
in the words of former CIA analyst Ray McGoverrn, “thought it a
good idea to mousetrap the Soviets into their own Vietnam debacle
by baiting them into invading Afghanistan in 1979, the war which
was the precursor to the great-power Afghan quagmire three decades
later.” In 1979, Soviet troops entered the country to defend the
Afghan government and remained there nine years. The effort was
pre-doomed; the USSR leadership had ignored warnings, coming from
even its own military strategists, that history had shown the fiercely
independent and resourceful Afghan would never be subdued by the
military might of foreign forces.

On
March 10, 1992, the New York Times reported that with the
Soviet troops having left the country, “Afghanistan’s President
made an impassioned appeal to the United States today to help his
country become a bulwark against the spread of Islamic fundamentalism
in Central Asia.” In an interview with correspondent Edward A. Gargan,
Najibullah “also pleaded for immediate economic and humanitarian
assistance from Washington,” which long backed the Afghan fundamentalist
guerrillas fighting his Government. He also promised that he would
release four Afghans who worked in the United States Embassy and
were convicted of espionage in 1983. “The
Afghan President’s praise for the United States and his attempt
to enlist Washington in common cause against fundamentalism marked
the sharpest departure yet from the open hostility that has characterized
relations between Kabul and Washington since Afghanistan’s leftist
coup of 1978,” wrote Gargan.

“We
have a common task, Afghanistan, the United States of America, and
the civilized world, to launch a joint struggle against fundamentalism,”
Najibullah told the Times, and “described what he thought
would happen to his country if Islamic extremists took power in
Kabul.”

“If
fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many
more years,” Najibullah said. “Afghanistan will turn into a center
of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned
into a center for terrorism.”

Well,
all that has come to pass.

I
was in Kabul February 15, 1989 when the final withdrawal of Soviet
troops from Afghanistan took place; they had been in the country
since December 1979. Most of the other reporters traveled to Jalalabad
for the start of the final retreat, moving with the departing forces
back to Kabul on their way out of the country. I remained in the
capital and on that day a few of us were taken by our guides from
the government to a shop that had been demolished by a bomb attack
the previous day. It wasn’t a big terrorist attack but the message
was clear: this is what is in store for Kabul now.

That,
too, came to pass.

Gargan attributed Najibullah’s appeal to Washington
to his having been “Abandoned by his former benefactors in Moscow
and cast somewhat adrift in the new politics of the region.” That’s
one way of putting it, but he really had no other choice. The USSR
couldn’t restrain the Taliban and the various mujahedeen factions
and besides it was in the midst of a political upheaval that would
about two years hence bring down the ruling Communist Party.

Najibullah had expressed support for a United Nations plan to summon – in Gargan’s
words “a wide spectrum of Afghans - including the Islamic fundamentalist
guerrillas - to a gathering that would lead to a political accord
to end Afghanistan’s years of civil conflict.” There is no question
that he persistently pursued a campaign for national reconciliation
and reached out repeatedly to tribal and religious leaders across
the country and the region. On the eve of the final stage of the
Soviet withdrawal, Najibullah repeated his call for compromise and
national unity before a large audience of notables and foreigners.
But the Mujahedeen “freedom fighters” (as they were then called
by the U.S. media and politicians at the time) and their benefactors
in the region and Washington weren’t interested. The Times
noted that the State Department refused to even comment on the Gargan
interview.

And
so the attacks continued. Najibullah and his Watan (Homeland) Party
remained in office until April 1992 when a major warlord, General
Abdul Rashid Dostum decided to switch sides and the government –
affected by severe economic difficulties (made worse by punitive
sanctions undertaken by the Russian Government of Boris Yeltsin)
– fell to the combined forces of mujahedeen and various tribal groups
(“warlords”). But
that hardly ended the country’s travails. The victorious groups
soon began to fight each other over the spoils. The greatest damage
to the country’s infrastructure and the city of Kabul came not from
the Soviet invasion but from the internecine rocket attacks following
the government’s ouster. In 1994, the recently organized Taliban
made its appearance on the scene.

Last
week’s attack by the Taliban on targets in Kabul carried with them
a grave symbolism. After Najibullah’s overthrow his family was able
to flee the country but he refused to leave, choosing instead to
take refuge in the United Nations compound where he remained for
four years. In September 1996 the Taliban took control of Kabul
from the Mujahedeen and began to bombard the UN facility. Najibullah
was taken from the compound along with his brother, his secretary
and his bodyguards. They were all hanged. The bloody body of the
deposed president was hung from a lamp post, his severed private
parts stuck in his mouth.

One
Afghan writer suggested Najibullah deserved his fate having been
naïve enough to think the Taliban would recognize the UN center
as out of bounds. Last week’s attack lay to rest that notion once
again.

And
so it came to pass that from that time forward to the Al Qaeda attack
on the United States September 11, 2001 and beyond, Afghanistan
has been and continues to be “a center of world smuggling for narcotic
drugs” and “a center for terrorism.”

Over
the years, the Left in that part of the world (and a lot of other
places) has made a many mistakes that contributed to the advance
of rightwing reactionary movements and forces. However, the biggest
culprits have been the U.S. and its Western allies. In their zeal
to crush communist, socialist and left movements and parties and
a desire to control petroleum resources, they have anointed and
fostered the fundamentalists over the secular and democratic, and
taken advantage of religious, ethnic and sectarian divisions, stirring
pots where they could find them from Central Europe to Iraq.

Oh,
and that narcotics thing. What short memories we sometime have.
Yes, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency sometime cavorts with
drug dealers. It did it in the war in South East Asia a few decades
ago. Remember the Golden Triangle? “If it sounds a lot like Vietnam
when Vietnam started to really come apart, it is — President Diem’s
grotesquely corrupt brother was a CIA source and a noxious agent
of influence,” writes Robert Baer, a former Middle East CIA field
office, in Time magazine.

“We
came into Afghanistan in October 2001 with the same willful blindness.
The CIA knew that its ally, the Tajik Northern Alliance, was a paid-up
proxy of Iran, just as it was fully aware that another ally, Uzbek
General Dostum, was one of Afghanistan’s great butchers (though
Dostum has always denied the widespread allegations of his brutality).
When it came to finding crucial partners on the ground, there were
simply no alternatives.”

According to Time, “From December 2001 through
2002, according to a former Drug Enforcement Administration official
speaking on condition of anonymity, ‘the CIA and the military turned
a blind eye to drug traffickers if they thought they could help
them against Taliban and al-Qaeda.’”

“We
had no problem dealing with Afghan Islamic fundamentalists, terrorists,
drug dealers and thugs when the Carter and Reagan White Houses waged
a proxy war against the Soviet Union in the ‘80s,” writes Baer.
“The CIA and the White House turned a blind eye to our proxies’
faults because the fundamentalists were the best fighters and happy
to take down our Cold War enemy.

“The
claim that Ahmed Wali Karzai has been on the payroll of the CIA
for the past eight years, as reported in today’s New York Times,
won’t come as a surprise to most Afghans, who have long considered
his brother, Afghan president Hamid Karzai, to be an American puppet,”
wrote Aryn Baker in Time onOctober 28. “The
revamped allegations that Karzai frère is deeply involved
in Afghanistan’s annual $4-billion drug industry isn’t much of a
shocker either - on the streets of Kabul and Kandahar the name ‘Wali’
has long been synonymous with someone who can get away with a crime
because he has friends in the right places. Diplomats, counter-narcotics
officials and commanders from the International Security Assistance
Force, NATO’s military wing in Afghanistan, have all privately (and
not so privately) expressed frustration with President Karzai for
not reining in his brother. In fact, the people most likely to be
shocked by the revelations are Americans back at home, who are already
wondering why we should be sending more soldiers and money to a
country whose leadership has rarely proved an adequate partner.”

As
it turns out there are more than two Karzai brothers. Citing recent
study published by the Center on International Cooperation at New
York University, investigative reporter Gareth Porter Writes:

“The
report suggests that the U.S. and NATO contingents are spending
hundreds of millions of dollars annually on contracts with Afghan
security providers, most of which are local power brokers guilty
of human rights abuses.”

“In
addition to Ahmed Wali Karzai, it names Hashmat Karzai, another
brother of President Karzai, and Hamid Wardak, the son of Defence
Minister Rahim Wardak, as powerful figures who control private security
firms that have gotten security contracts without registering with
the government.”

The
allegation of drug dealing and CIA payoff to Ahmed Wali Karzai”
throws into sharp relief the most crucial question the administration
now faces in Afghanistan,” wrote Mark Sappenfield in the Christian
Science Monitor last Wednesday. “Should America continue
its policy of working with warlords and disreputable power-brokers
in an attempt to use their influence to advance US interests? Or
should it instead focus on protecting the Afghan people – in many
cases from the very warlords the US has supported in the past?”

I
was sitting around the other day with a group of people whose views,
one might say, ranged from center to left. On Afghanistan they appeared
to be of the unanimous opinion that U.S. policy had to make a sharp
departure from the past. The best option for the Obama Administration
is neither “counterinsurgency” nor “counterterrorism.” Nor is total
disengagement desired, they agreed. The answer lies in development.
A “Marshall Plan” sized program to tackle poverty and illiteracy
in the region could improve the situation. Military escalation will
only make matters worse.

Of
course, launching such en effort would require an end to the fighting
and the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops.. A path to that would
likely lay in a proposal widely broached in Europe and hardly mentioned
in this country for an international conference involving; first
and foremost, all Afghanistan’s neighboring states and each of the
warring parties in the country with the aim of arriving at a security
agreement. It might come through the United Nations like the plan
that Najibullah was entertaining back in 1998 – long before September
11. Only this way can the conditions arise for the Afghan people
to decide their own destiny free of dictates and intrigues from
abroad. In any case, the proper path for the U.S. must not involve
continuing to bed down with the feudal warlords and the likes of
the Karzai brothers. That puts us on the wrong side of history and
decency.

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